Following the horrific attacks of October 7, 2023, when all performances in Israel’s classical music scene ground to a halt, it was violinist Rachel Ringelstein who broke the silence. Ringelstein is a founding member of the Carmel Quartet, an award-winning string chamber group. Just weeks after the terror attacks, she insisted that the group return to rehearsing works by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Shostakovich and other classical composers and, eventually, to performing them for their loyal audiences.

At the time, Ringelstein and her family were waiting anxiously for information about her niece, Staff Sgt. Yam Glass, one of the female observer soldiers, or tatzpitaniyot, stationed at the Nahal Oz military base near the border with Gaza. When Hamas terrorists overran the base, 15 tatzpitaniyot were murdered and seven were taken hostage. Glass’s fate was unknown until November 3, when the Israel Defense Forces announced that she had been murdered on October 7.

Yet Ringelstein found that bringing the quartet together gave her a sense of purpose amid the chaos. “Playing with the quartet was healing,” Ringelstein, who lives in Givatayim, recalled of those first terrible weeks. “It gave me the strength to keep going and to support my family and Yam’s family. I would go to quartet rehearsals and then drive to their house in Modi’in and sit with them. I could do that because of the music.”

On October 26, the Carmel Quartet became the first Israeli classical ensemble to play publicly again. With Israel at war and many Israelis traumatized and disoriented, the quartet brought classical music to their country and audiences back to the concert hall.

Now, almost one year later, amid the exhaustion and fears of the ongoing war, they are preparing for a new season of concerts for audiences looking for refuge and moments of musical beauty.

Based in Tel Aviv, the quartet consists of first violinist Ringelstein, second violinist Tali Goldberg, violist Yoel Greenberg and cellist Tami Waterman. Each season, the quartet, which was founded in 2000, presents about 30 concerts and participates in another 20 hosted by other ensembles and music festivals.

The quartet is dedicated to music education. In its main concert series, Strings and More, Greenberg, a professor of music at Hebrew University, speaks during the program. In addition to describing the compositions, he places them within a cultural and aesthetic context by juxtaposing the music with discussions of history, literature and visual art.

Over the years, the quartet has built not just an audience, but a community. It is the only chamber group in Israel with an annual subscription series—season tickets for five performances, each presented at intimate venues nationwide with crowds of 100 to 150 people.

“We fell in love with the quartet right from the beginning, not only because of the music they play, and the way they play,” said Orna Reshef, a software developer from Jerusalem, reflecting on the 10 years that she and her family have been quartet subscribers. “We also felt close to the people in the quartet themselves.”

This connection between the quartet and the audience proved crucial in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.

Greenberg, Ringelstein and their colleagues changed little about the planned programming for the 2023-2024 season—a few additions and some reframing allowed them to create an experience that spoke to the moment. For that first October program, which took place at the Jerusalem Music Centre, they performed Musical Maps, part of the scheduled Strings and More series. Its theme explored storytelling through musical composition and included works by Mozart and Mendelssohn—standard repertoire for the group—as well as a recitation of “Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carol’s well-known poem, accompanied by illustrations from his book Through the Looking Glass.

Greenberg used the poem, famed for its nonsense words, as an example of how meter and repetition can create a sense of orientation, or narrative, in poetry or instrumental music, and he compared “Jabberwocky” to Mozart’s string quartet in A major, K. 464. 

→ The Carmel Quartet at the Jerusalem Music Centre, November 1, 2023. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, String Quartet in A Major, K. 464, Movement 1, Allegro.

To acknowledge the pain all Israelis were feeling, the quartet opened Musical Maps with two added pieces: string arrangements of “Lu Yehi” (May It Be So) and “Al Kol Eleh” (For All These Things), both by iconic Israeli composer Naomi Shemer. These pieces—familiar, evocative, simultaneously mournful and hopeful—created a bridge between the plight of Israel post-October 7 and the suspended, imagined reality of the concert.

→ The Carmel Quartet at the Jerusalem Music Centre, November 1, 2023. Naomi Shemer, “Lu Yehi” and “Al Kol Eleh,” arranged by Ohad Stolarz.

Speaking before a full audience at the music center, Greenberg acknowledged that the four of them had never imagined beginning a season under such circumstances, during a period when “everything we recognize seems missing.” He added that that the concert was intended to provide “a moment of escape—not to deny the problems, but simply to be in another place.”

The idea worked. Author and law professor Orit Kamir of Jerusalem, a longtime subscriber, scarcely remembers which pieces of music she heard at the concert. Instead, she recalls only the sense of escape to a place of normality, a place of community. “The first two months [after October 7], I was in complete shock. I was out of it. I wasn’t functioning. I wasn’t working. I wasn’t doing anything,” she said. In this context, the quartet’s concerts provided “a small space of sanity.”

Oded Zehavi, one of Israel’s foremost composers and a frequent collaborator with the quartet, described those first performances as a brave reminder of what exists beyond the pain of the moment. “The Carmels took it upon themselves to give a point of reference to normality by continuing to play—not forcing anyone to listen, but saying, just remember there is a universe within the universe, and there is beauty within these days, and please come and share it with us. They were operating on a sense of communal duty ”

The second program of the season, themed Women in Music, included works by female composers Amy Beach and Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen as well as “Shira” (Song), a composition by contemporary Israeli composer Sarit Shley Zondiner, and Beethoven’s famous string quartet Op. 95, “Serioso.” In his commentary, Greenberg dedicated the concert to Ringelstein’s niece and all other Israeli women who fell in battle or were tortured or murdered on October 7.

“The whole audience was in tears,” Kamir recalled.

As part of their schedule over the past year, the quartet has performed for children in the Dizengoff shopping center in Tel Aviv and in other public areas as well as hotels throughout the country where evacuees from the Gaza envelope have lived as refugees.

→ The Carmel Quartet at the Dizengoff Center, Tel Aviv, October 24, 2023. “The Chicken Song,” arranged by Yael Shahar.

Bringing joy to even a few of these evacuees made the performances worthwhile, Greenberg said. “Once we went to a hotel to play, and it was clearly not something that interested most people there,” he recalled frankly. “But every now and again someone would walk past with a little child, and the little child would sit and listen and would respond, and then move on. But there were two women who sat there and listened from beginning to end. And our sense was, if we’ve done that for two people who don’t have a home at the moment and have been through something terrible, then that’s a big thing.”

The quartet has continued incorporating work by Israeli composers into their performances. At the Tel Aviv Art Museum in June, they performed a string quartet by Zehavi, the second movement of which Greenberg described as “sort of a prayer.” Composed in 2001, Zehavi’s work nevertheless captures the pain of a post-October 7 world; The quartet used its lush sound to project unspeakable heartbreak.

The quartet also performed at Yam Glass’s funeral.

Looking ahead, even as it gets ready for a new season of concerts, the quartet is preparing to play at a memorial concert that Ringelstein is organizing for Glass in November.

Reflecting on why the quartet’s wordless music has spoken to so many so profoundly in the last year, Ringelstein said, sometimes “we can’t express what we feel with words. There are no words. Words like ‘sadness’ are nothing compared to what we feel. And it’s all in the music—all our emotions are there in the music.” 

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Musicologist Rebecca Cypess is the Mordecai D. Katz and Dr. Monique C. Katz Dean of the Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yeshiva University. She is the author or editor of seven books, including Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment, and has written extensively about music in Jewish history.